Fruzsi and János arrived in New Zealand two years ago with two small children, one eighteen months old, the other three. If you ask them why they made the move, the answer isn’t about beaches. It’s about wanting an ordinary life in a calmer place.
“Our main motivation was to give the children a different future,” Fruzsi told me. “I see that life here is calmer, a bit more at peace on a global scale than anywhere else. Many places are dealing with something, economic trouble, war, politics, but here it doesn’t reach us the same way. You get this feeling of being on an island of peace.”
They considered their options carefully before settling on it. Canada was ruled out for the cold, the United States for the gun laws, Australia for, and Fruzsi laughs about this, her phobia of insects. New Zealand was the one that fit. During Covid, while the borders were still closed, she started reading seriously about how immigration actually works, and that’s when she contacted me.
The problem most people would have given up on
János has a specialised trade: he services CNC machines, the computer-controlled cutting machines used in manufacturing, and in Hungary he did that as a mid-level manager. It’s the kind of work that keeps a factory running. It is also so specialised that it doesn’t appear on the shortage-occupation lists at all.
This is the point where a lot of people stop. They search the list, don’t find their job title, and conclude there’s no pathway. That isn’t how it works. When a profession is this niche, the question isn’t “is it on the list”, it’s which legal framework the job offer can be built through, and what terminology the role is described in. Get that wrong and a perfectly good case stalls. Get it right and a job nobody thought was “eligible” becomes a residence pathway.
“The list of companies working with these cutting machines is so small it wasn’t even mentioned among the shortage occupations,” János says, and he’s right. So we didn’t rely on the list. We worked on the resume, mapped the handful of companies in the country that would even understand what he does, and prepared the case around the role itself.
When the window is one week wide
For János’s family, things moved quickly once they started. They began the job search in March, signed the employment contract and lodged the visa in May, and by July they were in New Zealand.
The case was helped by timing. The company that hired János hadn’t been able to fill his predecessor’s position for over a year, which meant a real, demonstrable need. And the family arrived during the post-Covid reopening, when a particular visa briefly allowed people to apply for residency almost immediately. That window was about a week wide.
They took it. The price was steep in the most literal way: they handed the keys of their house to the buyer on the day they flew out. There was no fallback, no “we’ll see how it goes for six months and decide.” When I think about the nerve that takes, selling the home before you’ve slept a single night in the new country, I still find it remarkable.
I should be plain about the trade-off, because it’s the honest part of this story. To make the move work, János stepped down. He took a service role at a small company, below where he’d been in Hungary, with limited room to climb because his direct boss is the owner himself. He doesn’t mind, but it’s the quiet truth of a lot of these moves. You rarely get the visa, the salary, and the same rung on the career ladder all at once. Something gives, at least at first, and it takes time and work for those things to come back into balance.
Landing on the South Island
They settled near Christchurch, on the South Island, and at first the apartment was empty. What filled it was other people. An Airbnb host liked them enough to let them stay until the keys to their own place came through. When they moved in, neighbours turned up with a fridge, furniture, and toys for the children.
“People here remember the help they once got, and they pass it on,” Fruzsi said. Garage sales and local community Facebook groups did the rest. The country runs on a strong zero-waste habit, so a family starting from nothing can furnish a home cheaply, sometimes for free.
The hardest adjustment wasn’t logistics, it was their older son, Oscar. He resisted English for a long time, and disliked the daily group activities at preschool, all of it happening in a language he didn’t have yet. The caregivers were patient, Fruzsi was allowed to stay with him through the settling-in, and after a change of preschool he found his feet within a month. Then one day, at the doctor’s office, out of nowhere, he started speaking fluent English to the nurse. They’d made flashcards, watched a few cartoons, talked about the words, but at home he’d always refused to speak it, because home was Hungarian. The fluency had been building quietly the whole time.
And then there was the dog. Bringing a pet is its own saga, months of paperwork, blood tests, vaccinations. One of their dogs was labelled a dangerous breed by the airlines and refused, again and again. They didn’t give up. Nine months later, via Amsterdam and a two-week quarantine, the dog finally arrived, and the family was whole.
What “the island of peace” actually means day to day
Ask them what’s genuinely better, and the list is concrete rather than dreamy. The streets are clean, if something drops, someone picks it up. Workplaces close in the afternoon and treat families as a normal part of life. The roads are calm in a way that surprised them most:
“In Europe, if you sit at an intersection a moment too long, someone’s leaning on the horn,” János says. “Here, if you wait a quarter of an hour because you don’t feel safe pulling out, the cars behind you just wait. They smile. Once, at the kindergarten car park, a mother couldn’t park, so I parked it for her.”
It isn’t a postcard. The houses are barely insulated, wool blankets and thermal layers were among their first purchases. Bureaucracy is slow, “urgent” can mean a fortnight, and the time difference makes calls home awkward. But the trade they made was deliberate, and two years in, they’d make it again.
Their advice to families thinking about the same move is the part I’d underline for anyone reading. Stay flexible, have a plan, but don’t grip it too hard, because the opportunity that looks second-best at first glance is sometimes the one that works out. And treat the whole thing as if you were just moving from the capital to a small town: you don’t yet know where the shops are, which park is nice, how things are done. Approach it that way and the size of the change stops being frightening.
If you’re weighing a move and your situation has the kind of complications that don’t fit a tidy category, a niche profession, an unusual timeline, a family with young children, that’s exactly the kind of case I like to look at honestly. You can read more about how I work, or just send me a few details and I’ll tell you what I think is genuinely possible.
